Replatforming your store without losing SEO: a checklist

Search engines rank individual URLs. When a store moves platform, URLs almost always change: Shopify, for instance, requires products under /products/ and collections under /collections/, which rarely matches the old structure. Every ranking URL that disappears without a redirect throws away its history and its links.

The other common causes are content that quietly gets shorter in the move, lost title tags and descriptions, broken internal links, missing structured data, and a staging site's noindex setting going live by accident. Each is avoidable with a checklist. A short period of ranking fluctuation after a large migration is normal; a lasting drop usually means something on this list was missed.

You cannot redirect what you have not listed. Build a single spreadsheet of old URLs from several sources, because each one misses something:

• A full crawl of the current site with a crawler tool
• The current XML sitemaps
• Search Console's performance report (pages with impressions or clicks) exported for the last 12 to 16 months
• Landing pages from your analytics for the same period
• URLs with external backlinks, from a backlink tool
• Any URLs used in active ad campaigns, emails or printed material

Then benchmark. Record organic sessions, revenue by landing page, rankings for your key terms and indexed page counts. Without a baseline you will not be able to tell whether the migration worked.

For every old URL, decide its new home. Rules that keep this clean:

• Use 301 (permanent) redirects, one hop only. Avoid chains where A goes to B goes to C.
• Redirect to the closest equivalent, not to the homepage. A discontinued product should point to its replacement or its category.
• Cover the variants: old product URLs with and without trailing slashes, collection-filtered product paths, paginated category pages, old blog URLs and image URLs that earned links.
• Keep the map in the spreadsheet so it can be tested automatically before and after launch.

Where you have a free choice of URL on the new platform, keep the old slug. The fewer URLs change, the less can go wrong.

Redirects move visitors; content keeps rankings. On staging, check that each important page carries over:

• Title tags and meta descriptions
• Heading structure and the full body copy of product, category and guide pages
• Product and breadcrumb structured data, including price, availability and reviews where you use them
• Image alt text and reasonably named image files
• Canonical tags pointing at the new URLs, not the old domain or staging
• Hreflang tags if you sell in more than one language or country
• Internal links updated to point directly at new URLs rather than through redirects

Also compare performance. A migration is a good moment to improve Core Web Vitals; it is a bad moment to make them worse with a heavier theme and a dozen new apps.

1. Remove password protection and any noindex tags or Disallow: / rules left over from staging.
2. Deploy the redirect map and test every row automatically, checking for a single 301 to the expected URL.
3. Check robots.txt on the live domain.
4. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console. If the domain has changed, use the Change of Address tool as well.
5. Spot-check canonicals, structured data and mobile rendering on top templates.
6. Confirm analytics, conversion tracking and ad pixels fire on the new checkout.
7. Place a test order end to end, including payment, confirmation email and stock update.

Launch at a quiet time of week, never during peak trading, and keep the old platform accessible for reference until you are confident nothing is missing.

Each platform has quirks that catch migrations out. The common ones:

• Shopify URL prefixes. Products, collections, pages and blog posts all sit under fixed paths, so almost every old URL will change. Shopify has a built-in URL redirects tool, and redirects can be imported in bulk as a CSV, which is where your mapping spreadsheet pays off.
• Products inside collections. On Shopify, a product can also be reached through a collection path, with a canonical tag pointing to the main /products/ URL. Make sure internal links and your sitemap use the canonical version.
• WooCommerce permalinks. Product and category bases are configurable in WordPress settings. Decide them before launch; changing them afterwards means a second round of redirects.
• Faceted navigation. Filter and sort parameters can create thousands of near-duplicate URLs. Decide which filtered pages deserve to be indexed, and keep the rest out of the index.
• Variants and discontinued products. If variants become separate products, or the other way round, map each old URL deliberately rather than by pattern.
• Apps and scripts. Review, search and subscription apps often inject their own markup and scripts, which can affect both structured data and page speed.

• First week: watch 404 errors daily in Search Console and your server or platform logs, and add redirects for anything missed.
• First month: compare organic landing pages against your benchmark and investigate any page that lost traffic sharply.
• Ongoing: recrawl the site, check indexing coverage, and keep your ranking tracker running.

Keep redirects in place for the long term. Google's guidance for site moves is to keep them for at least a year, and in practice there is rarely a good reason to remove them at all.

Replatforming is where development and SEO have to work as one team. We have done it before, including for a D2C homeware brand featured in our case studies that moved with zero downtime through peak trading. Our SEO and growth service starts from £600 a month, and eCommerce management from £189 a month. If you are planning a move, a free audit will tell you where the risks are before you commit. Get in touch.